The Church allows the possibility that some few persons are so tightly bound to the suffering Christ that the very marks of His crucifixion appear on their hands and feet, and sometimes side and head as well.

Why, though, did Christ Himself receive the stigmata, and why does He continue to bear them?

Isaiah foretold, "But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins. Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.... And he shall take away the sins of many, and win pardon for their offenses."

The Letter to the Hebrews teaches, "Son though He was, He learned obedience from what He suffered; and when He was made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him, declared by God High Priest according to the order of Melchizedek."

Jesus was crucified to take away our sins, and in so doing His humanity was made perfect, making possible not merely human beatitude in Paradise, but human adoption into the Divine Life.

In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus tells His disciples, "Whoever wishes to come after Me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me." This comes immediately after He rebukes Peter as Satan, for thinking not as God does but as men do.

What is the Christian's cross? It varies from place to place, and from Christian to Christian, but a cross is promised to each of us. This means a crucifixion is promised to each of us, and there is no such thing as a crucifixion that leaves no marks.

We should all, then, bear the stigmata of Christ. They may not take the form of bloodied palms or wounds in the side, but they will be none the less real for that. They may even be physically visible: lines on the face from praying for one's children; callused hands from helping needy neighbors with outdoor chores; a tired smile from enduring the workaday humiliations of thoughtless co-workers. They may be hidden: reddened eyes from tears shed before God in private; sore knees from kneeling in prayer; cruel and cutting words left unspoken and forgotten.

We are the union of body and spirit, each reflecting the other, so even our spiritual marks of discipleship will have some physical effects. As Jesus' own wounds have been glorified in His body, eternal marks of His pefect humanity, so might our stigmata, through which we are being perfected as His disciples, be glorified forever. In a sense, they may be the brandings by which the Son of Man separates the sheep from the goats.

Steven Riddle has been blogging a series of reflections on St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross's The Science of the Cross. In one post, he writes, "We must come to terms with our desires, slay them and remain faithful and true servants of Our Lord. Only in this is the path up Mt. Carmel and the presence of heaven on Earth.... But such is our goal...."

To which I reply, maybe such is our goal, and maybe such isn't. I would say my own goal is not the presence of heaven on Earth but the presence of me in heaven. And not just me, but you too.

I think this is another example of a persistent difference (though not an opposition) between Steven and me. Crudely put, I keep getting the sense he thinks everyone should be Carmelite -- in spirituality, that is, not in canonical status.

Now of course, Steven himself is Carmelite, in both spirituality and status. He can and should write from that perspective. Still, a lot of "only in this way"s and "such is our goal"s show up in his commentary, and they tend to be unconditional and unqualified.

I, certainly, cannot argue against St. John of the Cross that there is no other path up Mt. Carmel. But I am not at all convinced there is no other mount at the top of which God may be encountered.

Just to keep things complicated: Note I wrote that we aren't all called to perfection in contemplation. I do believe we are all called to some level of contemplation, because contemplation is for everyone.

"Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear? And do you not remember, when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many wicker baskets full of fragments you picked up?"
They answered Him, "Twelve."
"When I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many full baskets of fragments did you pick up?"
They answered Him, "Seven."
He said to them, "Do you still not understand?"

Camassia reminds me of an important principle for understanding Scripture: numbers mean something.

What they mean, exactly, I may not understand, but they meant something to the people who wrote them, and they are supposed to mean something to the people who read them.

"By the five loaves are figured the Five Books of Moses, by the two fishes, the Psalms and Prophets."

"Or the two fishes are the discourses of fishermen, that is, their Epistles and Gospel."

Or "by the five thousand men are meant those who, living in the world, know how to make a good use of external things."

Or "by the twelve baskets, the Apostles and the following Doctors are typified, externally indeed despised by men, but inwardly full of healthful food. For all know that carrying baskets is a part of the work of slaves."

"Or, in the gathering of the twelve baskets full of fragments, is signified the time, when they shall sit on thrones, judging all who are left of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the twelve tribes of Israel, when the remnant of Israel shall be saved."

Of the second miracle:

"the seven loaves are spiritual discourses, for seven is the number, which points out the Holy Ghost, who perfects all things."

Or "the seven loaves are the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the fragments of the loaves are the mystical understanding of the first week."

Or, the seven baskets of leftovers represent "the higher precepts of perfection, to which the multitude cannot attain...; nevertheless, the multitude is said to have been satisfied, because though they cannot leave all that they possess, nor come up to that which is spoken of virgins, yet by listening to the commands of the law of God, they attain to everlasting life."

Or "the seven baskets are the seven Churches. By the four thousand is meant the year of the new dispensation, with its four seasons."

"Or there are four thousand, that is, men perfect in the four virtues; and for this reason, as being more advanced, they ate more, and left fewer fragments. For in this miracle, seven baskets full remain, but in the miracle of the five loaves, twelve, for there were five thousand men, which means men enslaved to the five senses, and for this reason they could not eat, but were satisfied with little, and many remains of the fragments were over and above."

Take your pick, or pick 'em all, or pick something else, but don't think the numbers are just facts.

Just as two friends, frequently in each other's company, tend to develop similar habits, so too, by holding familiar converse with Jesus and the Blessed Virgin, by meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary and by living the same life in Holy Communion, we can become, to the extent of our lowliness, similar to them and can learn from these supreme models a life of humility, poverty, hiddenness, patience and perfection. -- Bl. Bartolo Longo, quoted in Rosarium Virginis Mariae

In a Lenten reflection last week, Fr. James Sullivan, OP, suggested a relationship between the five Luminous Mysteries, the Seven Sacraments, and the five virtues Bl. Bartolo claimed can be learned with the help of the Rosary. (Assume an "according to Fr. Sullivan" throughout the following.)

The first luminous mystery is the Baptism of the Lord, which obviously corresponds to the sacrament of Baptism. They both teach us something of humility: our Lord's baptism, because the Eternal God had become man, and was even prepared to accept baptism at the hands of a man unfit to loosen His sandal, for it was fitting to fulfill all righteousness; our own baptism, because it is an acknowledgement that we are utterly powerless to save ourselves. (Those of us who were baptized as infants must also allow the humbling fact that not even on the natural level did we choose baptism for ourselves.)

The Miracle at Cana calls to mind the sacrament of Matrimony. That particular marriage began with a great gift from God, a gift given secretly to cover the poverty of the newlyweds. All who are married are poor, dependent on God for the graces for their marriages to thrive and be a means of their salvation. Not all recognize this poverty, though, nor are rightly thankful to God for what He has done for them without their knowing.

The third luminous mystery is the Proclamation of the Kingdom. What the Pope adds in his letter proposing the luminous mysteries to the Church, which most descriptions of the new mysteries don't mention, is that Jesus' proclamation comes "with His call to conversion." [RVM 21] A call to conversion suggests the sacrament of Reconciliation, which in turn suggests hiddenness. We hear news of the Kingdom, and we ask ourselves whether it is to us a pearl of great price, and if so whether we are really willing to sell all we have to obtain it. We search the hidden recesses of our hearts to find what we will not yet part with, then go into a room, hidden from view, to confess our sins, and there, in the one sacrament protected by a seal of silence, we pronounce our intention of conversion and receive forgiveness for our sins.

Conversion may also suggest the Anointing of the Sick, where all else is set aside in the sick one's appeal to God for the grace of strenth, peace, and courage, to unite him more closely with the suffering of Christ and the fulfillment of the covenant Christ ratified by His suffering. The Catechism teaches that in receiving this sacrament a sick person "contributes to the sanctification of the Church and to the good of all men for whom the Church suffers." In doing so, he has accepted Christ's invitation to enter into His Father's Kingdom, taken up his cross, and begun to follow Christ.

What do the Transfiguration, Confirmation, and patience have in common? Confirmation completes Baptism, and if in Jesus' Baptism the Father announced His Son to the world, so in the Transfiguration He confirmed Jesus' Sonship, and showed to Peter, James, and John that Jesus completes the Law and the Prophets. St. Peter, as ever in the Gospels, fails his test of patience, wanting Jesus' fulfillment in time to be done with immediately -- and, by extension, his own journey to beatitude. The West has the custom of delaying confirmation, sometimes for years, after baptism; this in itself calls for patience (though I've never noticed impatience for the sacrament to be much of a problem for those children more than a year younger than the prescribed age).

The Institution of the Eucharist was, of course, the first celebration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist; its relevance to Holy Orders, and the centrality of offering the Eucharist in the lives of priests, are also evident. The Eucharist is the means to our own perfection in the image and likeness of the Son through Whose sacrifice we become sons and daughters of the Eternal Father. Christ Himself, in His humanity, was made perfect through the suffering signified in the Eucharist, and by participating in this sacrament we gain the graces we need to follow Him.

Bill White's strict Lenten regime has obviously uncluttered his mind, as he has "been researching bourbon the last day or two." The result of his research: "I'll start with Maker's Mark."

The question, "Which bourbon?" is like the question, "Which Bible translation?" Both have the same answer: "The one you find in your hand."

Bourbon, like all work of human hands, can be good or bad, which is to say well-made or ill-made, which is to say artistic or not. And like all the arts, the art of bourbon produces works that are only partially ordered by "goodness" (in the artistic, not moral, sense). By that I mean, given two bourbons, it's not necessarily true that one is "better" than the other. On the other hand, though it's only partial there is an ordering, so one particular bourbon genuinely can be better than another particular bourbon.

My claim is that all the arts are partially ordered by "artistic goodness," which is one reason those "100 Greatest" lists always generate so much discussion. Such lists are an attempt to force a partial ordering to be a full ordering, which results in claims as defensible as, "Green is better than burlap."

I will even go so far as to claim that mankind, considered as a set of individual creations the artistry of God, is only partially ordered by artistic goodness. This may be heresy; it is certainly a break with the tradition of an at-least implicit full ordering in the goodness of people, with of course Mary at the top of the order and everyone else lining up single-file behind her.

But it's also a break with the current mode of thought whereby we're all equally loved by God, me for being me and you for being you. What God loves is goodness, which is to say Himself, but love is by its nature fecund, so God has created Creation, which reflects His goodness and gives Him more to love. (Well, not more, strictly speaking, since the goodness of creation is really a participation in the goodness of God; really, creation gives God creatures to love. It's like (but not very like) adding crystals to the inside of a spherical mirror to give new ways the light inside can be reflected upon itself.)

So if humans really are partially ordered by artistic goodness, then there are two humans of whom it can be said one is better made by God than the other, and therefore the one is better loved by God than the other.

I don't think American Catholics on the whole are comfortable with saying such things these days, or at least not with allowing the possibility that there might be two more or less average adults of whom God loves one more than the other. But I don't think it makes sense to say instead that we're all equal; then you run into the problem Rob brought up on Camassia's blog: "[I]f you and I are both fully redeemed and 'perfect', in what way can we differ from each other?"

Parents necessarily adopt the habit of saying, "I love all my children equally," but I think we really mean, "I don't love any one child more than any other." God, though, can and (I say) does love some of His children more than others, because some of His children are better likenesses of His Only Begotten Son.

At the same time, though, I think some of God's children are neither better, nor worse, nor equal likenesses of His Only Begotten Son. I may be wrong, obviously; the goodness of humans may be fully ordered, so that quality of singing voice and perceptivity and all other human perfections are somehow commensurate, and they can be added up, as it were, to produce a univocal "goodness rating." I suspect, though, that between the painter and the poet there is not a ranking, nor even an equivalence, but merely the perfections of both.

From which the same would follow regarding the painting and the poem. And, for that matter, between the bourbon and the scotch.

This is a very vexing chapter, if you're trying to figure the relationship between Jesus and the God of the Old Testament. It defies both those who make the one to be a seamless fulfillment of the other, and those who try to completely separate them.

In the first story some Pharisees criticize Jesus and his followers for eating without ritually washing first....

The weird thing about this is that Jesus quotes Mosaic law to undermine Mosaic law. "Honor thy father and mother" is credited as the Word of God, but the food taboos of Leviticus are treated as mere human tradition. But in the Old Testament as we have it, at least, all that law appears as a lump, delivered by God from Mt. Sinai. Jesus seems to be implying, though he does not actually say so, that the true Word ends at the end of Exodus.

Revelation is a process. Since it's revelation to time-bound creatures like us, it has to be a time-spanning process if it's to be congruent with our nature.

Jesus is the fulfillment of the Mosaic Law (and in fact of all Revelation, being the one Word God speaks to mankind). As such, He teaches the fulfillment of each precept of the Law, including "Honor your father and mother" as well as "The rabbit and the pig are ceremonially unclean for you."

Note that the Pharisees had their own fulfillment of these two precepts: "Honor your father and mother unless you can get around it." "The rabbit and the pig are ceremonially unclean for you so wash your hands before every meal and you will be clean before God."

Jesus, of course, fulfilled them differently.

But in saying, "Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person," was Jesus treating "the food taboos of Leviticus ... as mere human tradition"?

I don't think so. First, we need to distinguish between the food taboos of Leviticus and the mere human traditions that grew out of these taboos (the so-called fence around the Torah). It was the human traditions Jesus was particularly speaking against.

Still, it's true that Christianity does not regard the food taboos of Leviticus as binding. How can what is in effect the abrogation of a law be its fulfillment?

Some laws are what might be called "useful laws." The law in the U.S. is to drive on the right side of the road, not because driving on the right side of the road is in itself good for us, but because it makes driving safer. It is a useful law.

Similarly, the food taboos given in Leviticus 11 are given, not because eating rabbits and pigs was necessarily bad for Israelites, but because eating them made the Israelites ceremonially impure -- that is, unable to participate in the ceremonies required of them by the Law.

Again, though, Jesus is the fulfillment of the entire Law, includng the ceremonial precepts. In His fulfillment of the ceremonial precepts, Jesus tells us no one is too unclean to approach Him -- or rather, that what makes a man ceremonially unclean with respect to Jesus is what comes from his heart, not what enters him.

The food taboos, then, are the means to ceremonial purity, and just as the notion of ceremonial purity is perfected by Jesus, so are the means.

Though I've written about, and on the whole against, personality cults in the Church before, it's not an entirely cut-and-dried matter. After all, I warmly encourage devotions to saints, and devotion to a saint literally is a cult, and may well include devotion to the saint's personality as well. (For that matter, there are countless people on-line who seem to have a devotion to St. Jerome's personality, without any evident devotion to his sanctity.)

Still, the very word "devotion" suggests there are those who aren't devoted. Anyone who has ever known a friend to fall in love with a doubtful prospect knows the sudden lurch into incompatible frames of reference when the subject of the object of devotion comes up. To quote one of my own objects of devotion:

'I say, Bertie,' he said, after a pause of about an hour and a quarter.
'Hallo!'
'Do you like the name Mabel?'
'No.'
'No?'
'No.'
'You don't think there's a kind of music in the word, like the wind rustling gently through the tree-tops?'
'No.'
He seemed disappointed for a moment; then cheered up.
'Of course, you wouldn't. You always were a fatheaded worm without any soul, weren't you?'
'Just as you say. Who is she? Tell me all.'

And if Bertie Wooster knows enough to take being called a fatheaded worm without any soul without a flutter, you should be prepared to forgive me my devotion, and I your lack of same, should I corner you in the vestibule with talk of novenas to St. Soter for successful fundraising drives.

As might be expected, Fr. Kevin O'Rourke, OP, has something to say in response to statements made at the recent Life-Sustaining Treatments and the Vegetative State congress in Rome to the effect that artificial hydration and nutrition [AHN] for permanent vegetative state [PVS] patients is "simply care," and therefore cannot be discontinued. Fr. O'Rourke considers AHN to be unduly burdensome medical treatment offering no therapeutic hope to PVS patients, and therefore discontinuable.

A statement Fr. O'Rourke is circulating among U.S. Catholic healthcare ethicists asserts, "The tradition of Catholic theologians in regard to removing life support has been confirmed by Pope Pius XII (1957), the Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith (1980) and Pope John Paul II (1995)," assuring "us that life support may be withdrawn if it does not offer hope of benefit or imposes an excessive burden. The decision concerning hope of benefit is to be made by the patient or the patient's proxy. A representative of the church may offer guidance, but should not preempt the right of patient or proxy."

This is not a simple ethical problem -- witness the need for a congress to discuss it -- and, to my mind, even figuring out how to solve it is not straightforward. Who gets to decide these things? "Hope of benefit" is a medical judgment, except for the part that's a moral judgment. "Undue burden" is a personal judgment, made in this case on behalf of a person who isn't giving his own current judgment, except for the part that's a moral imperative. Things change, and what was extraordinary yesterday is ordinary today; what is a medical treatment today might be considered basic care tomorrow. Medical ethicists see themselves as in the right spot for setting down principles, knowledgeable about both medicine and morality, but to what extent is hospital experience a help in judgment, and how much is it a hindrance? (Do medical ethicists even recognize the risks of familiarity to judgment? Do the rest of us even recognize the possibility of benefit from familiarity?)

(I also wonder about how much weight should be given to the fact that Fr. O'Rourke's position is one "that would be accepted by a significant majority of U.S. Catholic ethicists," or even by statements by American bishops, since I suspect that a significant majority of U.S. Catholic ethicists, and th bishops who rely upon them, have been trained, directly or indirectly, by Fr. O'Rourke.)

I haven't read enough about the recent congress or the American response to change my previous opinion that Fr. O'Rourke's position begs some essential questions, starting with, "Is a patient diagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state actually in a vegetative state permanently?" But I do think he is right to take issue with mischaracterizations of his position as entailing that a PVS patient "ceases to be a person." If the matter really is as clear as some at the congress seem to have said it is, it should be explicable without invoking straw-man counterarguments or demeaning those not yet convinced.

What Archbishop John Foley, president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, actually said was:

All forms of social communication evidence three basic principles: the priority of truth -- we are never justified in recounting lies; the dignity of the individual -- our communication should enhance and not diminish our innate human dignity; the common good -- our communication should contribute to the good of the community and not harm it morally or in any other way.

These three should be the dominant principles in our life: the truth, the dignity of the individual, and the common good. If all communicators were always guided by these three principles, our world would be a happier place.

Nârwen provides a link to J.R.R. Tolkien's essay, "On Fairy Stories." I recommend it to anyone who cares about fairy stories, or stories, or human nature (since they're all related). (Anyone who cares about Tolkien will [have] read it without my recommendation.)

Among Tolkien's insights is the hint of enduring human wisdom, not always explicitly recognized, in the "arbitrary prohibitions" of fairy tales: that some things are simply forbidden us (though he doesn't address the question of Who does the forbidding).

Even where a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practised long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of the tale's history because of the great mythical significance of prohibition. A sense of that significance may indeed have lain behind some of the taboos themselves. Thou shalt not—or else thou shall depart beggared into endless regret. The gentlest "nursery-tales" know it. Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick. The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation.

"'While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.'"

So speaks the unjust judge in the parable. But so does not speak everyone on the receiving end of mail campaigns conducted by indignant Catholics.

How can this be?

My theory is that most people on the receiving end of mail campaigns conducted by indignant Catholics are, not chancery rats or weaklings who yield before all stronger forces or even unjust judges who neither fear God nor respect any human being, but people.

If the end you seek is getting people to do what you want them to do, you're in the happy situation of having a choice of means. With machines, you don't have a choice: you have to use force to get them to do what you want them to do. But with people, you can use force, or you can use persuasion. (While with cats and teenagers, to complete the possible cases, there are no effective means.)

To use force as the means to get people to do what you want them to do, however, you need leverage of somesort. Note, though, that you aren't simply applying a force to the people, you are applying a directed force. The ability to swamp someone's mailroom with letters is not necessarily leverage, since it doesn't necessarily direct them to agree to do what you want them to do.

To use persuasion as the means to get people to do what you want them to do requires, I'm afraid, that bugaboo of Internet forums, an ad hominem argument. If you are genuinely acting for the end of getting people to do what you want them to do (instead of, say, feeling good about your righteousness), then you have to give them an argument they will find persuasive. You aren't (we assume) trying to persuade yourself they should do something, or to persuade some neutral party or the court of public opinion.

How do you know what arguments people will find persuasive? Well, it certainly helps if you know the people you're trying to persuade. If you don't know the people you're trying to persuade, I suppose you have a choice: you can guess what might persuade them, or you can decide you're unlikely to guess correctly.

If you want to guess, you might first guess what sort of people they are. Are they just like you? Are they just like all the other drooling idiots who drive you nuts? Are they easily categorized?

If you decide you're unlikely to guess correctly, what do you do? You might run through a risk management exercise: If I go with the most plausibly persuasive argument, what are the chances I'll make things worse, and how much worse would I make them? And you just might conclude trying to persuade someone you don't know using an argument they aren't likely to find persuasive is, in this instance, an ill-considered disproportionate means to the end of getting them to do what you want them to do.

In a great post that opens with a Fra Angelico Annunciation, Fr. Shane Tharp writes of "the true threads of what is beginning" with the Annunciation, including:

He still waits to be born. Baptism makes us mothers of the Word, one of the early Church Fathers observed.... The Holy Eucharist rests upon our innards, weighty as an embryonic child, but waiting, waiting to spring up to life and to be manifested. Yes, we too are made pregnant bearers of the Word, our bellies swollen with his Heart's Blood. But why have we not given birth? Is it because we are not enough like the woman of the Annunciation? We have not given birth because we have not emptied enough of ourselves. We have not given birth because we love not the will of the Father before all things. We have not given birth because we selfishly clutch at the goodness of Christ poured out to us as though it were only for us. It is for all to be distributed by us.

True, and more: Mary did not give birth while Gabriel stood before her. It took months for her to prepare (or rather, for God to prepare within her) Jesus to be born.

Might one way in which we are unlike the woman of the Annunciation be our impatience? Filled with zeal, touched by God with some special consolation, we are ready to evangelize the world NOW! Yet, for whatever reason, the world is not evangelized NOW, and soon our zeal for the kingdom fades as worries over that new knocking sound in the car engine increase. Then comes the reflection: "Guess I wasn't really supposed to evangelize the world after all."

We can't give what we don't have. We can't give a viable Christ to the world until He is viable within us, and that takes some time. Time to nurture the Word, to ponder in our hearts, to contemplate the face of Jesus. What God gave Mary was not the promise she would conceive and bear a son. A promise, once given, is ready to be shared with whoever needs to know of it. What God gave Mary was her Son Himself, and He wasn't ready to be shared with the wider world until He was fully formed in her womb.

So which Annunciation painting did your favorite bloggers post yesterday?

I have to say, I became instantly fond of the one Karen Marie Knapp posted. As Peony Moss comments, "although the painter depicts Mary in modern dress, he still uses the artistic traditions of depicting the Annunciation -- the traditional depiction of Gabriel, the lilies, the columns, the house, the blue dress, the book -- so it looks like he's really thinking about the Annunciation and not just going for a cheap gimmick."

The one thing I'd add is that there's an extra degree of anachronism in the painting, in that such a girl in the culture depicted would not be prepared for marriage, as girls Mary's age were in Mary's culture. That said, no one in any culture is ever prepared for the news Gabriel had for Mary, so we might take the anachronism as a symbol of the greater shock.

Peony herself, meanwhile, posted an, um, different painting, while admitting the one she wanted was yet a third, which Eric Johnson managed to find on-line.

Then there are the bloggers of rarefied taste who turned to Fra Angelico, including Father Tharp, Gerard, and Father Johansen, to list them in order of my increasing preference for the versions posted. (Though I think the image of that last painting I swiped from somewhere has better coloring than Fr. Johansen's. Either way, it was upon looking at this painting that the though first occurred of taking Beato Angelico as my patron in the Order.)

I was thinking this morning that it would be nice if the Annunciation were a Really Big Deal in the Church, up there with Christmas and Easter. For one thing, it would be good theology, since the Annunciation is held to be the actual moment (or at least close to it) in which God became man. For another thing, it would be good apologetics, a way of showing that Catholics really do believe that something precious comes to be at conception.

But I don't have much say on the liturgical calendar, which has had an organic growth from the earliest days of worshipping at sunrise on Sunday after observing the Sabbath the day before. Christmas has been the Feast of the Incarnation as long as there's been a need for such a feast, and so it shall remain.

It occurs to me, too, that observing the Annunciation as a Solemnity without obligation to attend Mass is in keeping with the character of the event it commemorates. It was a private moment, an intimate exchange between heaven and a single human heart, that only gradually is made known to others. The Nativity is the time when this private event literally bears public fruit, when the angels sing to men and men to each other. But today we call to mind those first delicate moments, when God is made man yet not man fully made, and with the patience and humility of every mother Mary begins the months-long process of letting her child be formed within her.

The Eternal Father invited Mary to make a home for God in her body. Without a doubt she had already made a home for Him in her soul. Today on this great feast you and I are once again invited to make a home for God in the deepest center of our being. Our Yes to the Lord's invitation is not to an idea or a project but to the three-Personed God of Love....

The feast of the Annunciation reminds us that only when our surrender to God becomes receptivity patterned on Our Lady's Yes can our hearts truly become a home for the Word of God to dwell in. This feast is appropriately celebrated during Lent because without fail such surrender will inevitably lead to the Cross, in whatever form Christ wishes for us. Often for us it is little things: weakness in our personalities that we can't seem to overcome; physical sickness or limitations; anxieties over those we love or the long days of darkness in prayer. Jesus, who loves each of us as His spouse, wants us to give Him even these things. Our "grandfather" Saint Augustine exhorts us to this total self-giving so that we will be one with Him on the Cross: "Let Him be placed in complete possession of your heart, who for you was placed upon the Cross."

[Our "grandfather" Saint Augustine: Dominican friars and nuns observe (after a fashion) the Rule of St. Augustine, who is therefore regarded as something of a "pre-founder" or "grandfather," with St. Dominic of course the founder and father.]

On the subject of The DaVinci Code in particular and "female rituals of sacred worship" in general, Kathy the Carmelite has done the sowing (and the plowing, and the mucking about with quite a bit of fertilizer) that we may do the reaping.

Be very careful about approaching Mary, even (especially?) out of simple curiosity. She's very likely to take your hand, look you in the eye, and say, "Do whatever He tells you," and you'll be very likely to say, "Yes, Mother," without even thinking about it, and then you'll be stuck, a disciple of the Lord, and the Lord's discipleships very rarely constitute nothing but drinking the best wine.

Ever Virgin, ever fruitful,
On that day in Nazareth,
Waiting for your humble fiat,
All of heaven held its breath.

Ever Virgin, ever fruitful,
On the day when you gave birth,
All of heaven's angels gloried:
God Himself made man on earth.

You who once brought God to sinners
Labor still, your work undone.
Ever Virgin, ever fruitful,
Ever bring men to your Son.

Still, even if we resolve the "Mary of Scripture" and the "Mary of Tradition," so to speak, there remains a certain unmet and half-expressed expectation that, somehow, Mary should be different, that, if she doesn't actually glow in the dark, there should be a faint shimmer about her as she moves through the streets of Nazareth. How do we resolve this tension, this apparent ordinariness where we expect something almost magical?

It seems to me it wasn't necessary for Mary to entirely get what was going on in Jesus' life (and here I'm straying from the Catholic tradition of arguing for the fitness-nigh-unto-necessity of Mary being practically perfect in every way). Also, her not entirely getting it signifies a bunch of things to the rest of us; e.g., we can't count on entirely getting it, either, and we should always be prepared for God to surprise us, and even where to look for Jesus when we find we've lost Him.

So given a) that it wasn't necessary for Mary to have complete understanding of Jesus' mission, and b) that her incomplete understanding would teach us more about ourselves than her complete understanding would, the tension implied in a Mother of God who does not completely understand her Son seems worth it.

Mary's great (even defining) act of faith was her answer to Gabriel, at a moment when she was not yet a virgin pregnant with a child who would be called Son of the Most High, and of Whose kingdom there will be no end.

Remember, faith is "a participation in another's knowledge," not credence in one's own senses. So while the fact that she did bear a son while a virgin gave good reason to trust the further promise of the angel, that of Jesus' kingdom there will be no end was still an object of faith for Mary throughout her life, since she had no direct knowledge of eternity.

And yet, the half-expressed expectation of someone midway between human and divine can still nag at us.

Let me suggest a reason for this expectation, without implying anyone who might have this expectation does so for this reason: Maybe some of us, maybe myself included, half-think that if Gabriel appeared to us and we gave birth to the Son of God, then we would glow in the dark. Maybe we figure that a contact like that with God would raise us into a higher order of being, somewhere between man and God.

And maybe, if we half-believe this even as we know it's not true, maybe we half-believe that the fact Gabriel hasn't appeared to us explains why we don't glow in the dark. More seriously, maybe there's a half-belief that God hasn't done enough for anyone to seriously expect us to have Christ living in us. Maybe there's a half-belief that God better get cracking with the fancy stuff if He really wants us to be, you know, saints.

Veneration of Mary does come up as a topic in Luke, though not in a way that makes it immediately plain why there are statues of Mary in most Catholic churches:

While [Jesus] was speaking, a woman from the crowd called out and said to him, "Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed."

He replied, "Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it."

Is this a rebuke to those who would venerate Mary? I see it, not as a rebuke, but as a correction or clarification to the woman's words of praise that serves three purposes.

First, it shows that any honor Mary might deserve from Christians is due her first and foremost because she heard the word of God and kept it. (Which, after all, is pretty much what we read Luke's infancy narrative, and in the earlier report of the visit of Jesus' relatives.)

Second, it shows that an honor similar to that of Mary is available to anyone who desires it, simply be hearing the word of God and keeping it.

Third -- and this is an idea I'm stealing from a coincidental email from Kathy the Carmelite -- it guards against veneration of Mary on purely physical grounds, or indeed on any other grounds than fidelity to the One God. Of all creatures, we value Mary the highest, but not for what she is in herself (and still less for any "sacred feminine" some claim she signifies). We value her entirely for what God has done through her, even as the ways in which we express the value we assign her necessarily adopt incarnational dimensions. Her womb is not blessed because it bore Jesus; her womb bore Jesus because God blessed her, and through her each of us.

This principle holds, even when particular Catholic practice improperly loses sight of the principle.

The three synoptic Gospels eachtell of Jesus being told His "mother and brothers" want to speak to Him. Jesus uses this as an opportunity to teach, "My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it."

What can we learn from these passages, besides the facts that a) Jesus made use of the teaching opportunities that came His way, and b) His mother and His brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it?

Well, one other thing is suggested by Mark 3:21, which provides the reason Jesus' relatives came to see Him:

When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize Him, for they said, "He is out of His mind."

Though all three synoptic Gospels mention their arrival, neither Matthew nor Luke (the two with infancy narratives) report that they thought Jesus was out of His mind. Is this simply a matter of leaving out a detail that makes the infancy narratives harder to understand?

Neither Matthew nor Luke put the scene of the arrival of Jesus' relatives in much context. Mark, though, mentions that His relatives "set out to seize Him" after hearing reports of Him. What reports?

Well, the verse immediately before they set out to seize Him is, "He came home. Again the crowd gathered, making it impossible for them even to eat."

So, on the natural level they've got a Relative Who is causing such a commotion, He (and those commoted) can't even eat. That might seem to call for an intervention, even from someone who knows He is the Messiah. (And we might point to the miracle at Cana as an example of Mary successfully imploring Jesus; she might have had something similar in mind here.)

On the supernatural level, Mark is comparing the doubt of Jesus' relatives -- which, for what it's worth, is not explicitly ascribed to Mary herself (though the context does seem to allow for that) -- to the doubt of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem.

Jesus' relatives think He is out of His mind. And, as Peter would later show, even one who believed Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, might criticize the way He was going about being the Messiah.

The scribes, on the other hand, say He is an agent of the devil, which Jesus points out is irrational (and, by implication, a worse mistake, possibly an everlasting mistake).

When, finally, His relatives arrive, Jesus completes the lesson by saying faith, not blood, makes a person His true brother, sister, or mother.

Did Mary have the faith to make her a true mother of Jesus? Scripture (to say nothing of Tradition) indicates she did -- but at the time of Jesus' ministry in Galilee her faith was not yet made complete by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

It's in the distinction between the perfect faith expressed in Mary's "Let it be done to me according to your word" at the Annunciation and the completion of that faith in the wind of Pentecost that I find the room to accomodate both her lack of understanding when Jesus was twelve and her arguable lack of understanding when He began His public ministry (always leavened by the understanding she showed at Cana).

[Most of these posts are cribbed from comments I made on the "A mother's joyful love" post below. My thanks to Rob, Jennifer, and Millinerd, non-Catholics all, for talking this stuff over with me.]

I think it's unlikely that the veneration Catholic and Orthodox pay to Mary, the Mother of God, would be predicted by someone who knew only what he read in the Gospels. Not just because so little is actually said of her, but because some of the few things that are said aren't altogether flattering.

How, for example, does a Catholic who believes Mary is the All-Holy Seat of Wisdom understand her misunderstanding when she discovered her twelve-year-old Son in the Temple?

Speaking for myself, I understand it by assuming Mary was more "normal" than a lot of the pious legends would allow. Jesus, too, for that matter.

If, say, Jesus had never (or rarely) referred to God as His Father before He remained behind at the Temple at age 12, then His play on words ("Your father and I," "My Father's business") would naturally confuse Mary, if she herself were not given to spending hours a day rapt in contemplation over the ineffable mysteries of the Incarnation.

In fact, a relatively normal Mary -- one who isn't herself an all-knowing glow-in-the-dark plaster statue with a demur half-smile and downcast eyes -- serves in part as a guarantor of the Incarnation. Even as we proclaim her the Mother of God, if she is a true-to-life woman, then we are proclaiming the Son of God is true man.

It occurs to me that truth is one of those things that require no preparation -- for which, even, no preparation is possible. (Love is another one of those things.)

Note I wrote "truth," not "a particular truth." People certainly do need to be prepared for certain specific truths, an idea that in Christianity goes back -- well, the the Adamic Covenant, I suppose, but I was going to say "to St. Paul":

Brothers, I could not talk to you as spiritual people, but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ. I fed you milk, not solid food, because you were unable to take it. Indeed, you are still not able, even now, for you are still of the flesh.

But the only way to prepare someone for a particular truth, I think, is with another truth. This is simply how humans learn, by moving from what we know now to something we don't already know.

If it's true that nothing but truth is a preparation for truth, though, then anything other than truth is an ill-considered disproportionate means to the end of truth. We may tell ourselves we're just getting someone ready for the truth, but if we're using some means that isn't giving him the truth, we aren't really preparing him for the truth.

These thoughts were prompted by something I read about the folks who regard, for many different reasons, Pope John Paul II to be a disaster for the Church. They look forward to his death or resignation so that they can finally get on with the business of correcting all his errors.

But the only way to work for truth is truth. Complaint, condescension, deprecation: these don't prepare anyone for the truth of anything. If one were given to unfounded speculation, one might even conjecture that complaining about the Pope is a self-serving disproportionate means, in that it gives the illusion of engaging his position without requiring any actual engagement.

Of course, this phenomenon is not limited to Catholics who don't like the current Pope. It occurs whenever someone perceives an obstacle to truth and settles on a plan for removing that obstacle that itself isn't the truth. "Since he'll only hold up the vote, let's not invite him to the meeting." "Ask her yourself, if you like, but everyone knows she's a liar." "You're very thoughtful and honest, unlike all those troglodytes in class. Would you please read this book and tell me what you think?"

Our disproportionate plans may or may not be sinful, but if we're really as concerned for the truth as we say we are, we should be aware of the truth of our plans to prepare for the truth.

The scribe said to Him, "Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, 'He is One and there is no other than he.' And 'to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself' is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."
And when Jesus saw that he answered with understanding, He said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God."

There is, in Scripture, dogma, and pious imagination, no human person who, from her conception, through her whole life, and even beyond her death to all eternity, has been closer to the kingdom of God than the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary. One might reasonably conclude, then, that Mary loved her neighbor as herself. And indeed:

This maternity of Mary in the order of grace began with the consent which she gave in faith at the Annunciation and which she sustained without wavering beneath the cross, and lasts until The eternal fulfillment of all the elect. Taken up to heaven she did not lay aside this salvific duty, but by her constant intercession continued to bring us the gifts of eternal salvation. [Lumen Gentium 62]

But what forms did her love for her neighbor take during her natural lifetime?

Setting aside pious legends, we have the story of the Visitation, following hard upon the Annunciation, when Mary rose in haste to her kinswoman Elizabeth to celebrate the natural and supernatural graces God had given them and, through them, the world. There is the wedding at Cana, where with the instinct of both a faithful daughter and a wise mother Mary knew Whom to ask, and how, for the most unlikely of Divine favors.

And... there's not much more.

We may well imagine the countless acts of charity Mary's sinlessness implies: helping other mothers with children and chores, perhaps mending rifts between friends or cooling the well-side gossip against a neighbor. But such acts are remarkable only for the purity of the one who performed them, not for the size, scope, or uniqueness of the acts themselves.

It might be said that Mary's "public ministry" as Mother of the Church began at the foot of the Cross, just as her "private ministry" as mother to Jesus was reaching its fulfillment.

The idea I'm trying to tease out of all this is that, even during her private ministry, between the Annunciation and the Crucifixion, Mary was loving all others in and through her private ministry. It was God Who gave her this ministry, this means of loving others by feeding and clothing and bathing and teaching Jesus. She did not (as far as I know) prophesy to the other mothers of Nazareth, or steal the Baptist's thunder by calling on her neighbors to repent. She did not send Joseph into the synagogue to read Scripture and declare, "In just a few short years, these words will be fulfilled in your hearing."

Mary did not found hospitals, or schools, or any sort of popular movement. Her charity, her participation in God's own love for her neighbors -- in Nazareth, in Judea, in the Andes -- was expressed in her raising her Son as best she could. It was a love of neighbor wholly informed by love of God, and wholly conducted according to God's will for her life.

It was a love of neighbor of a dignity far beyond anything you or I have the opportunity to express, and yet, if we follow Mary's model, our own humble acts of charity will be worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices, and we shall live, today and forever, in the kingdom of God.

Tomorrow evening is the final Lenten reflection at St. Andrew Apostle Church in Silver Spring, MD. (Next week there's a one-friar concert; the following week is a penitential service.) As always, chanted Evening Prayer begins at 7:30 p.m.

The preacher tomorrow is Fr. James Sullivan, OP; his topic is "The Graces of the Luminous Mysteries: The Rosary and Our Life of Prayer." And I'm not just saying Fr. Sullivan is an unfailingly excellent preacher because, as the provincial promoter of the Dominican Laity, he's my boss's boss. I can guarantee this will be worth the effort required to attend, or your money back.

Fr. Sullivan studied philosophy and humanities at Providence College in RI, and then entered the Dominican Province of Saint Joseph of the Order of Preachers. He earned a Licentiate in Philosophy from Catholic University of America in 1993, a Master of Divinity in 1994, and a Licentiate in Sacred Theology in 1996, both from Immaculate Conception College (The Dominican House of Studies). He was ordained in 1995. Fr. Sullivan was first assigned to Saint Gertrude Parish in Madeira, OH, where he focused primarily on Adult Edu cation. He has taught theology, written articles for journals and has served on the boards of various organizations. He is on the Preaching Board of Advisors for the Dominican Province of Saint Joseph. He is a part-time professor of Theology at Saint Joseph’s Seminary - Dunwoodie, in Yonkers, NY, but currently his main assignment is as Provincial Promoter for the Laity, serving as the Order's link to the 4,000 members in the 60 Third Order Dominican Laity Chapters in the Province.

Disputations doesn't get visitors from the sicko Google searches that bring some people to some other blogs (naming no names), but there have been two animal-related searches in the past day or so that stand out among the "Christianity intellectual defense" searches, or even the "budweiser AND commercial AND super bowl" searches. They're the sort of queries that make me think winter has lasted a bit too long. Summer, too, since one of them was from Google Australia.

I know Catholics often call Joseph the "foster-father of Jesus." But I prefer to follow Mary's example:

"Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety."

Of course, Jesus answers equivocally (showing, those of us who were once twelve-year-olds in trouble, no little human wisdom), "Why were you looking for Me? Did you not know that I must be in My Father's house?"

Still, St. Joseph was Jesus' father, even if a thousand years had to pass before our Christology was solid enough to begin to consider the implications. There has been a lot written about the infinite condescension shown by God to place Himself under the command of a mere human father, but if Jesus was a man like us in all things but sin I can't believe Joseph treated Him as a divine houseguest, or as a magical talisman of unsearchable power in human form.

Jesus was the son of Joseph (who himself was a son of David), and would have been treated as such, even as He would have been treated according to St. Joseph's understanding of His role in God's plan for Israel. In this is the mystery of the Incarnation. Mary was closer to the mystery and, we might suppose, saw further. But it was a mystery Joseph lived with every day, one which he could not simply contemplate but had to live with, had to adjust to.

We, too, are faced with the mystery of Jesus as God and man. But we are also faced with the reflected mystery of each other, created in God's image and likeness, created to become adopted children of the Father even as Jesus is His begotten Child. How do we contemplate, live with, adjust to this mystery, that the child we scold or praise -- and the the coworker we greet or laugh at, the person in the paper or on television -- is a creature who from eternity was to be created for eternal glory?

"...is that the profane imagination seems balked by the mystery of the sacred, the human imagination falling away from the fact of the divine imagination wording things as it wills...." -- Paul Mariana, quoted below by Neil Dhingra

But while much can be learned by the sort of soft-focus (soft, but not mushy!) devotional meditation on St. Joseph marvelling at the God-made-man in his home and his arms, much can also be learned by meditation on the harder, more practical aspects of raising a good Jewish son in the Roman Empire of the First Century, and then trying to reconcile the two visions of Joseph the Just.

We might begin with the title the Church gives St. Joseph on this, his principal feast day. His litany (which is still indulgenced!) gives him many titles:

Renowned offspring of David; Light of Patriarchs; Spouse of the Mother of God; Chaste guardian of the Virgin; Foster father of the Son of God; Diligent protector of Christ; Head of the Holy Family; Most just, most chaste, most prudent, most strong, most obedient, most faithful; Mirror of patience; Lover of poverty; Model of artisans; Glory of home life; Guardian of virgins; Pillar of families; Solace of the wretched; Hope of the sick; Patron of the dying; Terror of demons; Protector of Holy Church.

For his feast day, though, he is given a much more prosaic title: Husband of Mary.

Now, obviously "Husband of Mary" implies "Spouse of the Mother of God" and many of the other titles. But let's stick with "Husband of Mary" for a minute.

First, the word "husband" is usually understood to refer to the man in a relationship of marriage, and "marriage" these days is generally understood as a relationship between equals, line an equal partnership in a business.

But though men and women are equal in dignity before God, they do not assume equivalent roles in a marriage. Being a husband confers a certain authority that is not conferred by being a wife, which perhaps is why the angel appeared to Joseph when it was time for the Holy Family to move.

In short, the story of Joseph, Husband of Mary, is the mystery of a man made lord of the LORD's household, and ruler of His possessions. And just as Jesus was true man and Mary the true Mother of God, so was Joseph the true earthly father of Jesus and the true husband of Mary. He wasn't the confused old man fearing cuckoldry of the medieval passion plays. He wasn't a deferential host to a Madonna and Child with ethereal smiles who glowed in the dark. He had true authority over the Mother of God, of a kind none of us would dare to exercise (and rightly so, since none of us possess it), and he exercised it in a true manner.

Mary was Joseph's wife, not his mother given him by Jesus on Calvary, and he treated her as such. And genuinely so; he didn't just pretend. There was no, "Er, if that's all right with you," said or implied when he told Mary they were leaving for Egypt.

If, as the Polish saying has it, "St. Joseph shakes his beard and see: winter's disappeared!," then St. Joseph must have dandruff in his beard, because that's snow coming down. Not as much here as up north, but still.

While we're on the subject of St. Joseph and hair care, look at some of the holy cards at this site. You got your young Joseph, you got your old Joseph, you got your bearded-yet-androgynous Joseph.

You even got your "How's it going, Joe, want a Schlitz?" Joseph.

But notice that, in almost every portrait of St. Joseph, he's got short hair, or at least relatively short hair.

So how come Jesus always has hair down to his shoulders? Didn't His father ever say, "Yes, yes, in Your Father's house are many mansions, but as long as You're living in my house, you're getting a hair cut!"?

Did you ever eat dirt to quench your thirst? Me, too. What was I thinking?

Or did you ever tell a friend you would help her move, then when she asked why you never showed up tell her, "I did help you move! I took a nap."? Me, too. It introduced a chill in the conversation.

Okay, maybe I haven't done exactly those things, but I have done things no more likely to achieve what I said I was trying to achieve than eating dirt is likely to quench thirst. And I know I'm not the only one.

I think the examples of eating dirt and napping represent two different kinds of disproportionate means (i.e., means that, baldly considered, have no reasonable chance of achieving their stated end). The first kind are simply ill-considered. Eating dirt wont' quench thirst, going to work in a bathrobe won't lead to a promotion, glaring at someone in church won't make him more reverent.

The second kind are self-serving means. Napping may not help my friend move, but I find it refreshing. Telling my friends about my child's report card may not help them judge their children's progress, but it gives me a warm feeling. Gossipping about a neighbor may not correct her faults, but it does cement my position as the one with his finger on the pulse of the neighborhood.

The question that comes to mind when considering ill-considered disproportionate means is, not "What was I thinking?," but "Was I thinking?" I may adopt certain means reflexively or habitually, in which case I should probably make the time to reflect on whether these reflexive or habitual means make any sense. Or it may be nothing more than plain bad reasoning I need to correct (a popular fallacy is "I respond to X with Y, so if I do X everyone will respond with Y.").

The question that comes to mind when considering self-serving disproportionate means is, "What is the end I am truly seeking?" This can be a tough question, because a lot of us are pretty good at fooling ourselves, along such lines as, "I tried to help him, but it's not my fault if he wouldn't let me." (Or the old joke about the person who takes the larger of two slices of cake, then when told, "If I had chosen first, I would have picked the smaller piece," answers, "You got the smaller piece, didn't you?")

Answering the question requires self-honesty, which is a habit we will only develop if we choose to. The level of honesty the world demands of us, that we habitually develop simply by living among others, is not sufficient to uproot self-serving means. But then self-honesty is something sought first out of love for ourselves, as imperfect but perfectable children of God, and only secondarily out of love for others.

So the woman who mentioned The DaVinci Code to my son the other day has assured me she considers it an adventure story, not a relevatory history book. (Hence a certain amount of redaction in yesterday's "Don't Read Blogs" post.)

Which would bring this all to a comfortable and timely close, like a sitcom plot driven by a misunderstanding, except that a number of coincidences lined up in the past two days, as a result of which I've pledged to my Lay Dominican chapter to arrange a talk on that infernal book some time this Spring.

And, like Basil Fawlty, I shall try to soldier through with it, for fear that next time God won't choose farce as the genre to convey to me a suggestion.

Believing that God is the source of all truth, the Church does not hesitate to make use of truth wherever She finds it.

Believing that pleasure is the secret of all happiness, society does not hesitate to make use of pleasure wherever it finds it.

And ever the twain shall meet on March Seventeenth.

We lost the "Saint" in "Saint Valentine's Day" in my lifetime. I wonder when we'll lose it in "Saint Patrick's Day." I suppose that's up to the Catholics. We can hardly expect the Epicureans to keep track of our honorifics for us.

Still, and with due respect to the proper tenor of the liturgical season, "Tabhair dom a rud céanna mar atá ag an fhear ar an urlar!"

Steven Riddle wonders about the dynamics that come into play when someone takes something like The DaVinci Code seriously:

If someone accused your mother of being a slut would you run for the dictionary, to show that by definition she is not? Or would you simply let love take the lead. This is not to fault those who wish to address and correct the errors that are introduced here. It is to fault whatever mechanism gives rise to so weak a love of Jesus that some are inclined to take seriously any calumny uttered against Him.

A weak love, however, doesn't cause ignorance, nor (as far as I know) are the falsehoods in the novel particularly calamnous toward Jesus. The calumnies are (as far as I know) directed against the institutional Church, and love for the institutional Church itself does not flow immediately from love for Jesus.

There's another reason that a Catholic finding Dan Brown a credible source of history is not necessarily a sign of the weakness of that Catholic's love for Jesus: A person's beliefs are not necessarily consistent. I may well have mutually contradictory beliefs and be completely unaware of it, particularly if I formed the beliefs at points in time that are far apart. I might believe, say, that the Eucharist is an outward sign of an inward grace somehow related to Calvary (a belief formed in childhood), and that St. Athanasius invented the Sacrament of the Eucharist as a way for bishops to wrest power away from the more-popular monks (a belief formed by reading some junk history last year). Even if I would recognize the theological disconnect between those beliefs if I saw it, I wouldn't necessarily see it if no one pointed it out to me.

Now, it's true that love tends to cause a desire to know more about the beloved (to say nothing of knowing the beloved more!), so a strong love of Jesus should tend to cause a desire to know more about Him. But many lifetimes can be spent getting to know more about Jesus without touching on Church history. And much can be learned about life in the sacraments without touching on them as historical phenomena.

All in all, then, I'm inclined to assume good will and even good faith on the part of those Catholics who might believe some or all of the falsehoods and absurdities of The DaVinci Code and similar bogus works. Where that assumption is true, the love for Jesus -- and for the Church He founded -- already exists, and it really is primarily a matter of historical instruction.

American Catholics are not good on Church history; we know there are dodgy bits that don't bear much scrutiny, and we're generally willing to accept the role of whipping boy society (taking over from English Protestantism) assigns us. I don't think it takes much instruction to change from the either/or of imeccability/source of all societal ills to the both/and of the Mystical Body of Christ composed of sinners.

Chanted Evening Prayer with a reflection by Fr. John Langlois, OP, on "Penance – Weight Reduction Plan for the Human Heart."

(Yeah, I know, but never judge a Dominican sermon by its title.)

Fr. Langlois received his S.T.L. from The Dominican House of Studies in 1992 and was then assigned to Providence College, where he taught in the Theology Department and in the Development of Western Civilization Program. In 2000, he obtained the S.T.D. in Church History from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, with a special concentration in the Reformation period. While teaching at Providence College, Fr. Langlois also served as archivist for the Dominican Province of St. Joseph from 2000 to 2002. He has been a participant in OPUS, a collaborative research group of Dominican men and women whose goal is to produce a comprehensive history of the development of the Order in the United States. In June 2002, he was appointed Student Master at The Dominican House of Studies and also joined the faculty at that time.

Over the weekend, I read St. Thomas More's The Sadness of Christ, a meditation on Christ's agony in Gethsemane. One point St. Thomas makes is that we must not allow sorrow to make us sleepy, both literally (remember when "keeping a vigil" meant staying up all night praying rather than going to Saturday evening Mass?) and figuratively, in the sense that our prayers are said senselessly if they are said at all.

Another St. Thomas defines the vice of sloth as an oppressive sorrow that so weighs upon a man's mind, he wants to do nothing. As a special vice, sloth is sorrow in the Divine good, finding sadness in the things of God where charity finds joy. Following St. Gregory, St. Thomas lists six daughters of sloth: malice; spite; faint-heartedness; despair; sluggishness in regard to the commandments; and wandering of the mind after unlawful things.

I will admit that things like this article weary me. Even trying to summarize the paranoia, ignorance, blindness, and heresy expressed by the two religious sisters quoted wearies me. I feel a similar weariness when I read articles in my local newspaper on the inevitability (and, often enough, the gosh-darned wonderfulness) of designer babies, human cloning, gay marriage, and so forth.

Such weariness leaves me feeling spiteful, faint-hearted, despairing, and sluggish. Why? Because as a Christian I should do something about the ignorance, injustice, and evil I encounter, and there just seems to be so much of it.

However, the virtue that opposes sloth happens to be charity. Which means when I am feeling slothful regarding some perceived Christian duty, all I need to do is respond with charity, and the first and best response in charity is prayer, which is always effective.

Assuming it's done.

He said to them, "Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not undergo the test."

This morning at breakfast, my eight-year-old mentioned that a Catholic woman we know told him there was a book that would completely change how people thought of the Last Supper. Since she had mentioned the book to me a couple of weeks ago, I knew she was talking about The DaVinci Code.

There was a time -- some folks call that era "February 2004" -- when I would have said I benefitted from reading blogs. In particular, I would have said reading open book gave me the benefit of knowing enough to avoid The DaVinci Code as an irritating time-waster.

But now, with the scales new-fallen from my eyes, I see how wrong I was.

Because if I didn't read blogs, I wouldn't know much of anything about that book, and I would have accepted the copy offered me last Fall by a friend, and I would have set it on a shelf among two hundred other unread books, and I would have said, "Oh ah?" when the woman told me it was intriguing a couple of weeks ago, and I would have said, "Really? Huh," this morning when my son told me it would completely change how I thought about the Last Supper.

But no.

Instead of, "Really? Huh," I said, "That book is complete junk, written by a fool!" Later, I got angry at the woman for exposing my child -- however obliquely -- to an anti-Catholic conspiracy theory. Later still, I got angry at her for forcing me to plan a parish-level response to The DaVinci Code, which necessarily involves a) planning a parish-level response, something I'm neither competent at nor authorized to do; and b) reading The DaVinci Code, and the only good thing about reading The DaVinci Code I can think of is that it isn't Atlas Shrugged.

Now, I'm mad at Amy Welborn, for leading me down the "it's not 'just a novel'" path to begin with.

And I have to tell you, it's not at all satisfying that the next thing I have to do is buy Amy's book.

It occurs to me that it is critical for us Christians to separate our sinfulness from our lovableness. We need to recognize that, fundamentally, neither depends on the other. That's the only way we can make sense of the fact that we are sinners beloved by God.

Here I don't mean making intellectual sense out of God's questionable choices for the objects of His affections. I mean practical sense for ourselves to understand who we are and what we are to do.

If my sinfulness depends [inversely] on my lovableness, then if I am lovable I am not sinful. But I am lovable; in fact, I am loved, and there's a crucifix in my pocket to prove it. So, if sinfulness depends on lovableness, I must not be sinful. "I am lovable and not sinful": does that sound like a sentiment you've encountered recently?

Putting it the other way round, if my lovableness depends [inversely] on my sinfulness, then if I am sinful I am not lovable. But I am sinful, which would mean I am not lovable, and God can't love me, although if I'm careful and sufficiently craven He just might let me get away without being damned, if lovableness depends on sinfulness. This sentiment might be in the minority these days, but in various times and places it has, I think, dominated.

Now, there is a theological relation between sinfulness and lovableness. The less sinful you are, the more "you" there is to love, and in that sense the more lovable you are. As a practical matter, though, since we don't have very accurate being-meters, the state of this theological relation is hidden from us, and all we have to go on are the dual facts that God loves us no matter how sinful we are -- which preserves us from despair -- and that no matter how much God loves us, we are sinners -- which preserves us from presumption.

O sacred Banquet, wherein Christ is received, the memory of His passion is recalled, the soul is filled with grace, and there is given to us a pledge of future glory.

We are (or should be) used to the idea of the Eucharist as a "re-presentation" of Christ's sacrifice on Calvary, that it makes present in our churches the one sacrifice offered once and for all outside Jerusalem nearly two millennia ago. We understand, indeed many of us can testify, that receiving the Eucharist confers graces upon the receiver. We might even occasionally think of the future glory pledged by the Eucharist -- the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, Who is now seated at the right hand of the Father.

But Abbot Vonier quotes this prayer in the context of discussing how, as he writes a page before, every sacrament

recalls the past, it is the voice of the present, it reveals the future.

A sacrament can do these things because it is a sign.

Being a sign of something else might be thought of as an imperfection, as though what really counts is the thing signified and the sign itself is ephemeral, passing from the mind as soon as what is signified is recognized. This isn't the case with a sacrament, though; the fact that it is a sign is what makes it capable of containing the past, the present, and the future all at once.

As St. Thomas writes (and Abbott Vonier quotes), when discussing whether a sacrament is a sign of one thing only:

...a sacrament properly speaking is that which is ordained to signify our sanctification. In which three things may be considered; viz.

the very cause of our sanctification, which is Christ's passion;

the form of our sanctification, which is grace and the virtues;

and the ultimate end of our sanctification, which is eternal life.

As I suggested, thinking of the Eucharist in these terms comes more or less readily to Catholics. Baptism, too, if we are aware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death, and that if we have grown into union with Him through a death like His, we shall also be united with Him in the resurrection.

But what about the other sacraments? Do we ever think about how marriage recalls the past, or holy orders reveals the future?

I know that I tend to collapse the idea of a sacrament into an outward sign of an inward grace given by the sacrament. That's certainly true, but it's inadequate. If the graces received are all there is to it, then what's the point of the sign? To tell us particular graces are being received? Then why not just pray for those particular graces and skip all the fuss with the oil and the water and so forth?

Because, as Abbot Vonier explains, you need a sign if you want to tie the past, present, and future all together, and

to limit the sacramental power of signification to the present moment, to the transformation of soul which takes place when the sacrament is received, would be an unwarranted minimizing of the sacramental doctrine, and would leave much of our scriptural language unintelligible. (p. 16)

In his homily this morning, my associate pastor mentioned that the verse from Matthew I quoted below is the only record we have of Jesus laying claim to a virtue. The full saying is:

Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for your selves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.

Meekness and humility are curious virtues for the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, but just the thing for the Lamb of God.

And yet, Jesus is not presenting Himself here as the Lamb of God. He's presenting Himself as the source of an easy burden and light yoke, as an easer of burdens and a giver of rest. He is the fulfillment of the Law, which through the centuries had become a burden to those who followed it, rather than the source of comfort and joy of the psalmist.

So what does meekness and humility of heart have to do with giving easy yokes?

Here's my guessexegesis: When God gave the Law to Moses, He concealed Himself on Mount Sinai where only Moses could approach. Later, God spoke to Israel through His prophets, and of course He had His priests to offer sacrifices in the Temple.

But the coming of Christ is the coming of the Lord among His people, all of whom are now invited, even commanded, to an intimate and loving life with Him. For a people raised on stories like Uzzah the Smited and a Law that even the just man stumbles against seven times a day, the presence of the Lord might well be as much a source of fear as joy.

So Jesus reassures them, claiming for Himself meekness and humility not for his own honor -- far from it -- but out of love and compassion for His people: "I come in meekness, not in wrath. I come in humility, not in the glory that is death to the sinner."

There are a number of things, it seems to me, that this leaves out.... Why love your enemies? According to this line of thought, the suffering on earth are only getting their just deserts ahead of schedule.

And of the "Christus Victor" theory:

One of the few things it has in common with SA is that it remains myterious why you should love your enemies. Especially since your enemies also seem to be enemies of God.

I thought we are to love our enemies that we may be children of our heavenly Father, who loves our enemies. That, at least, is the context for Jesus' teaching to love our enemies in Matthew 5.

I'm told that, to the Jewish way of thinking in Jesus' day, what you do is who you are, which is why for instance His saying "your sins are forgiven" was such a scandal. It wasn't just that only God can forgive sins, but, put the other way, that whoever forgives sins is God.

The extension of the commandment to love from one's neighbor (necessary for the survival of Israel) to one's enemy occurs in Matthew as Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, the Good News which in its fullness tells us we are intended to become true children of God. As Camassia quotes, "God became man that man might become God." And a child does as his father does.

Just a few scattered thoughts prompted by the talk given Tuesday night by Fr. Reginald Whitt, OP, from the text:

Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another, if one has a grievance against another; as the Lord has forgiven you, so must you also do. And over all these put on love, that is, the bond of perfection. [Col. 3:12-14]

First, I learned that it is markedly unsatisfying to listen to an exhortation on the Christian virtue of patience while your children are climbing on top of you in the front pew and asking if they can go back to the vestibule and have another cookie. Talk of forbearing suffered wrongs really takes the spice out of plotting dreadful punishments.

Fr. Whitt also spoke of meekness, the virtue that moderates anger. Note that it moderates anger. It doesn't smother anger, or replace anger, or ignore anger, or uproot the capacity for anger; all of these things are immoderate, probably impossible, and certainly not Christian virtues.

When Jesus said, "Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart," He didn't add, "except when I'm arguing with Pharisees or driving out moneychangers." Even then He was meek, moderating the anger that the Messiah of the Lord felt toward those who would distort the Lord's teaching and defile His Temple.

Obviously, Christian meekness isn't the secular meekness of passivity and inoffensiveness. To be meek is to be gentle, not limp, in the face of provocation. In fact, it can (and probably should) cause us to be provocative ourselves, perhaps even to give offense. Again, meekness only moderates our anger, and if our anger is justified it is not alway virtuous to fail to act on that anger.

Fr. Whitt used a notable turn-of-phrase along these lines: Kindness and humility together compose a Christian temperament by which we live together as Christians. I thought that was interesting: if you are kind and humble, you have the right temperament to put on true Christian love, the bond of perfection; if not, not. We say it takes all kinds to make the Kingdom; maybe we should say the Kingdom takes from all kinds and makes their temperaments suitable.

Finally (for this post, not in the talk), Fr. Whitt argued against a carrot-and-stick understanding of the prayer, "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." Forgiveness that is conditional, he said, isn't forgiveness. God doesn't say, "I'll forgive you if you forgive these others," which is more of a taunt than an expression of mercy. Rather, our failure to forgive is one of the things we need to be forgiven, and only the forgiving can receive the forgiveness God bestows on everyone.

Still, I took the quiz, and felt myself being inexorably drawn toward an order that turned out to be... the Cherubim.

Of course, thanks to that oaf Raphael (the painter, not the archangel), I can't say, "I'm a cherub," and impress many people. But it seems to make sense, granting the absurdity of the question, as does Steven Riddle's answer of Seraph.

..."Cherubim" ... is interpreted "fulness of knowledge," which Dionysius expounds in regard to four things: the perfect vision of God; the full reception of the Divine Light; their contemplation in God of the beauty of the Divine order; and in regard to the fact that possessing this knowledge fully, they pour it forth copiously upon others.

And those last two things have more than an echo of the Dominican motto "to contemplate and give to others the fruits of contemplation."

Meanwhile,

Dionysius expounds the name "Seraphim" according to the properties of fire....

[Seraphim] are borne inflexibly towards God.

...the action of these angels, exercised powerfully upon those who are subject to them, rous[e] them to a like fervor, and cleans[e] them wholly by their heat.

...these angels have in themselves an inextinguishable light, and that they also perfectly enlighten others.

And finally,

the "Cherubim" have the excellence of knowledge and the "Seraphim" the excellence of ardor.

So I'd allow as that the Seraphim are to Carmelite spirituality as the Cherubim are to Dominican spirituality, while noting that "in the angelic orders all spiritual perfections are common to all the angels."

I was struck by this, from yesterday's Evening Prayer's intercessions:

Inspire all teachers and artists to prepare mankind for your kingdom.

It seems a strange pairing, teachers and artists. In fact, it seems strange to mention artists at all in the course of the liturgy for a Tuesday in Lent.

But if all things are to be ordered in and for Christ, then art too must be ordered in and for Christ. This prayer mentions one order for art to carry out: preparing mankind for the Lord's kingdom.

In itself, art is making a thing well. The purpose for making a thing may be good or bad; often enough there's no real purpose at all. But all that is Christian has a good purpose, and Christian art can serve the purpose of preparing for the Kingdom, of plowing the soil where the seeds of the Gospel are to be planted.

That's a high purpose, one perhaps not considered as often as the purpose of instructing or delighting those who already have the Word growing within them. If our art is not directed toward preparing as well as nurturing, our world will be the poorer for it.

Peter Nixon writes about what the life of St. John of God suggests about our sense of worthiness:

I may be stretching this a bit, but I think that what ended up happening with John of God is that he moved from a sense of his unworthiness based on his own failings to a sense of his unworthiness based on his understanding of God’s love for him....

To pray that we might be "worthy of the promises of Christ" is not, like John before his spiritual breakthrough, to pray for our own moral perfection. It is to pray that we might be fully opened to the stunning, overwhelming, inexplicable and entirely gracious love that God pours out on us and that we may be able to love like that in return.

Worthiness is a quality of a person or thing that in some way justifies the bestowal of a certain honor. Scripture often refers to God's praiseworthiness and trustworthiness. Of the Evangelists, Luke seems most concerned with the idea of being worthy -- or rather, with not being worthy: John the Baptist is not worthy to untie the thongs of Jesus' sandals; the centurion is not worthy to receive Jesus under his roof; the prodigal son is not worthy to be called his father's son; Jesus warns His disciples that who is not trustworthy will not be given more and better, and that merely following commandments is the action of a unworthy servant. Luke does record a few examples of worthiness: the faithful servants who are worthy of five or ten cities (tempered by the example of the wicked servant worthy of nothing); those "deemed worthy to attain to the coming age."

In the Gospel of Luke, then, worthiness is almost always expressed in the context of servitude: a servant recognizes he is unworthy of reward; a master acknowledges a servant as worthy.

Worthy are you to receive the scroll and to break open its seals, for you were slain and with your blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation. You made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will reign on earth....

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches, wisdom and strength, honor and glory and blessing.

The Lamb did more than turn ten coins into twenty coins. He was slain, and with His blood purchased a kingdom for God. In so doing, He becomes worthy to receive honor and glory and blessing.

This is the worthiness of the Christian disciple, by resemblance to the Father's Son, the Lamb that was slain. It's not simply the worthiness of servitude writ large, though. That worthiness is based on justice; the worthiness of the Christian disciple is based entirely on an unmerited grace given out of God's love for us.